The Revival of English Domestic Architecture. V. The Work of Mr. Ernest George (1896)

To appreciate fully the gain of the nineteenth
century, in the matter of palaces (the word is
hardly an exaggeration), owing to Mr. Ernest
George, it is best to remember the typical nobleman's country-seat which preceded them. Who
does not know the huge square box, with or without
a Palladian portico, that figures so largely in illustrated county histories? Portland Place, or even
the older clubs in Pall Mall, maintain a certain
dignity amid urban surroundings, but a mansion of
the same sort set upon a hill, a huge white cube, with
dots for windows, is always as hideous an addition
to a fine landscape as a white tramcar ticket would
be if stuck upon the mid-distance of a painting by
Corot or Constable. Nor was the sudden, and
fortunately brief, lapse into railway-station Gothic
much more fit. True that its streaky walls, and
parti-coloured scheme generally, afforded an excuse
for ivy and other creepers, and so in the course of
years, by dint of hiding its costly beauties, the
thing grew less intolerable; yet it was fidgety and
harsh in its contour, hardly less in relation to its
surroundings than are the preposterous little villas
which one sees often enough amid most charmmg
scenery from any of the northern railway lines of
France. These perky inaisoneltes look no more
out of place than the huge compilations in red,
black and yellow bricks, with gritty carved capitals
and shiny granite columns in the very-Victorian
Gothic style of the sixties and seventies, that here
and there intrude upon exquisite scenery.

The mansions of Messrs. George & Peto are
as far removed from the sham Classic as the sham
Gothic. For their progenitors one has not to turn
to old Greece, nor to Lombardy, but to England,
and "merrie England" at that. The typically
English half-timbered farmhouses, the Elizabethan
mansions, the almshouses of pious founders, and the
palaces of our own kings, present an immense variety
of styles and differ in essential features, but all the
same they are British by birth, and have fallen harmoniously
into our English landscape. Such cottages,
or halls, appear hardly more intrusive than the great
elms and oaks against which they are so often seen.
They do not seem to have been built with the one
object of being picturesque, but to have become so by
force of circumstances. In
short, they look like contemporary portraits of their
owners, well-dressed and
superbly at ease; not like
supers or amateur actors
wearing gorgeous finery with
a nervous sense that it is
unaccustomed and uncomfortable attire.

Among the few modern architects who have succeeded,
not once but dozens of times,
in the difficult task of rivalling these "stately homes
of England," Messrs. Ernest George & Peto are easily first.

Shiplake
CourtThe Great Hall. [Click on these images to enlarge them.]

One of the most successful houses — Shiplake
Court, Henley-on-Thames — is familiar to frequenters of the
stream of pleasure. The size of The
Studio page does not admit any adequate view of
the whole frontage, but those who wish to refer to
it will find drawings by the architect, reproduced
in the Building News of May 31, 1889. To study
this house, even in the drawings, is in itself a liberal
architectural education. The first impression is
that it must have grown and developed in accordance
with its inmates' tastes and needs, although
(I believe) it grew only in the architects' brains,
and was built straight away from the working drawings. It seems as if generations might have passed
between its first stone and the final touch. Here
is a stately oriel casement, with an arcaded porch, opening on a terrace with balustrades
and flights of wide steps leading to the river-bank
below, a stately architectural faiçade that suggests
comfort and luxury without undue display. On
the other side the courtyard front seems more
home-like, and at least a century earlier in the proportions
of its component parts. The square
battlemented tower, with its angle turret staircase,
and the rows of small square-headed windows
recall the quadrangle of a well-known college; but
the large half-timbered gable that breaks the line
of roof, gives a touch of domesticity which the
well-grouped chimney shafts assist no doubt in
maintaining.

If in the drawing of the interior of the hall at
Shiplake Court
it appears too ecclesiastical, or at
least too like that of a public building, a photograph
of the interior, fully furnished, dispels any such idea.
Only those whose good fortune it is to live in high
and well-ventilated rooms can realise the simple
luxury of ample space, which is at once healthy and
imposing. Merely as an architectural triumph this
notable room, with its finely proportioned fireplace,
its high panelling, and the oak screen at the far
end, is so obviously a masterpiece of its kind that
to point out its beauties
would be a work of supererogation. A fireplace,
with tall pilasters above it, the chimney-breast treated
sometimes fronted with a cornice, as in Shiplake, and sometimes as in West Dean Park, Singleton,
by a semicircular pediment, or still more simply
in the Great Hall, Batsford, is distinctly an 'Ernest-Georgian' feature; but
perhaps not more typical of the personality of the artist
than are his staircases of
the type illustrated in Buchan Hill, Sussex,
or the hall of North
Mymms, Herts. The staircase in each case is made strikingly
decorative by its ample proportions and the open
arcading which imparts a series of structural support
that satisfies you aesthetically and practically. For
Mr. Ernest George realises in all his work that the eye
must be satisfied as well as the building surveyor. It
is not enough that a thing should be permanent and
stable, it must look so as well. We all know the
feeling of insecurity which certain stone staircases
present. To find out how
their vast weight is supported is not merely puzzling
but almost distressing to an untrained spectator. Yet
if the space underneath be filled in by a glazed screen
or an iron grille, the average person never feels the
lack of pillars to carry the great weight which to him
seems stuck upon the wall. In the gallery or balcony which Mr. George also delights in, as in the hall at North Mymms, that at Shiplake Court, or
yet another illustrated here - Ball-room of a Country
House — we find a feature that is at once
practical and picturesque. There is always something romantic in a balcony, whether because of Juliet, or that English memories of minstrels'
galleries, watching chambers, and other forms of
the indoors balcony still retain a peculiar charm;
there is no doubt that even in its most simple forms
there is a certain pleasure as you stand upon it in
watching people below, or from beneath as you
carry on conversation with those aloft.

Before leaving the interior of these halls we must
not overlook another treatment of the hearth,
namely, the great hooded chimney-piece seen in
North Mymms and Buchan Hill., a style which is
perhaps less English than Mr. George's alternative
treatment, but not without precedent in our own
land, if more common in foreign chateaux.

Left: Chimney, Buchan Hall. Middle: The Great Hall, North Mymms. Right: Ball-room of a Country House. [Click on these images to enlarge them.]

To give a complete list of the more important
houses is not possible here. Yet some of them
must be referred to individually. Motcombe (Lord
Stalbridge) is not less interesting for its plan than
its delightfully harmonious façade. In the plan
you find a block containing all the reception-rooms
and private apartments almost completely detached
from the offices, which surround a kitchen court.
The Morning Room, Motcombe, with its panelled
wall and coffered ceiling, and the hall with its
stately chimney-piece and open-raftered flat roof,
are among the most delightful of Mr. George's interiors.
The exterior of Buchan Hill, Sussex,
already referred to, is a trifle more fantastic than
most of Mr. George's work, Elizabethan though it
be. A slightly French accent seems to have been
imparted to it, but in all probability the actual
house is far more simple than is its appearance in
the black-and-white drawing reproduced in the
Building News (July 7, 1887).

Studleigh Court, Devon, is a long and comparatively low building on an L-shaped plan. The
hall, which is open to the roof, the full height of
the building, has a fine bay window, and others
which are set at some height from the ground.
The absence of a tower, and the presence of the
half-timbered gables, assist in giving a domestic
rather than palatial character to the fine building.

Woolpits, Surrey (Sir Henry Doulton), is very
unlike the rest of Messrs. George & Peto's work.
It is a large house, with a tower capped by a
pyramidal spire; severe in its masses and detail, it
yet lacks some of the repose we associate with far
more ornate Renaissance designs by the same firm.
The chimney-shafts, with interlaced arcading,
almost Norman, and the treatment of the drip
courses above the arches of the piazza at the
lefthand side of the hall, all show features rarely
present in these architects' designs. Dunley Hill,
Dorking (Admiral Maxse), might also fail to be
attributed to Messrs. George & Peto at first glance;
but the library of one story, which equals the
height of the rest of the two-storied structure, and
certain minor details betray the authorship after
more intimate study. A house at Ascot (Ernest
Stoner, Esq.), has the unusual addition — unusual,
that is to say, in modern English houses — of a
chapel. Possibly its oblique position on the plan
is due to that strict orientalisation which English
ritual has adopted almost invariably. Nevertheless
the whole group lacks the unity and impressive
effect of Mr. George's better known mansions.

A superb house, without and within— Glencot, Wells —
can hardly be described in words. Its
situation on the slope of a hill, with a stream passing
beneath an arch of one of its terraces, has been
most fully developed. The external staircases
(they are too lofty to be considered as flights of
steps from one terrace to the other), the deep
recesses with balconies, the comparatively small
windows, and the curious air of solidity which the
great mass of the whole building possesses in
unusual degree, might fairly entitle it to be a
masterpiece. The interior, as readers of The
Studio know, is no less beautiful; indeed, certain
rooms still haunt one as perfect, whether you
compare them with old or new work in any country.
It is a house which might provoke a Diogenes
to envy, and make the most contented person
covetous.

North Mymms, in the architect's own drawing,
seems a veritable Elizabethan house. Its stately
courtyard, with a central fountain, its formal
garden, and a certain unsymmetrical arrangement
of its parts, reveal once again Mr. George's
peculiar genius for suggesting a result that has
been evolved, rather than invented. The stables
and outbuildings are as admirable as the main
building, and the whole place a thing to remember.
The Knoll, Barton, a far less palatial house, is
another well-nigh perfect example of picturesque
effect, gained by simple direct use, of features
commonplace enough in themselves. A great
architect takes these words in every-day use, and
makes of them a poem in bricks and mortar — his
imitators copy detail by detail, and yet the result
is doggerel. But the difference between a poem
and a neatly made piece of verse, is often too
subtle to be differentiated in a liasty criticism like
this. Batsford, Gloucester, must be passed with a
brief mention. Littlecroft, New Forest (Morton Peto,
Esq.), has been the subject of many illustrations in
The British Architect (Dec. 17, 1886); admirers of
Messrs. George & Peto's work should refer to the
details of this charming house, where not merely
the structural features have been sketched by Mr.
T. Raffles Davidson, but a sundial, a lantern, even
a pair of snuffers finds a record.

Rawdon House,
an old building restored by these architects, is so
fully illustrated here, that in the
absence of more information as to the original
state of the house, it would be impossible to add
anything else of moment. A yacht, The Cuhona
(for Sir Andrew Walker), is perhaps less out of
place if noticed among country houses than elsewhere. Its interior in The Architect (Oct 6, 1883),
must be taken with a grain of salt. No yacht could
carry a small town-hall comfortably; but accepting the convention of its perspective, it is instructive to see that the ornate panelling and generally
luxurious features which modern taste deems the
proper compensation for a floating prison, can be
made gorgeous in an artist's hands without being
gaudy and hideous. The steamship saloon
is usually a triumph of bad taste, splendour
that becomes sordid by its too plentiful detail, and
a riot of extravagant decoration generally. The
same publication (July 6, 1883), contains many
sketches by Mr. Raffles Davidson of other fittings
and appointments of The Cuhona, with a sketch of
the yacht at anchor.

The secret of the work of
these architects is surely apparent to all who care to
study it. It is not the use
of any particular material,
adherence to any given style,
nor the originality which is
eccentricity masquerading
under a nobler name, nor
abject reverence for precedent which is barely disguised pedantry. Full knowledge of the architecture of
the past is kept in its rightly
subordinate place by equally
full recognition of the modified conditions of the present,
and the result is sane and
practical work, that also happens to be beautiful because the sanity is that of a scholar, and the practical conduct is dominated by
an artist's intuitive sense of the right proportion and
the right place to use ornament. To know when
to be restrained is not enough, one must also know
when to be prodigal; and that Mr. Ernest George's
work is proof of his perfectly well-balanced artistry
is proved so clearly, even in the drawings
reproduced here, that all which has been written does
but indicate the lesson which they proclaim openly.